www.JackrabbitCheese.com
(Joi image.)
“Scientific investigation… has made industrial cheese making more efficient, which is a less pleasant thought, for the inevitable concomitant of idustrial efficiency has been a standard of meditocrity…” –The Cheese Handbook (Bruce H. Axler), available on Google Books.
Americans eat an average of 222 pounds of meat each year. Though we only rank 17th in world per capita consumption (Denmark ranks #1, followed by the Czech Republic and Spain), that’s still a lot of meat– roughly 73 billion pounds per year, the equivalent of 146 million heifers or 18 billion chickens.
We eat more chicken [...]
Dairying has a long and distinguished history. The passage above comes from J. Twaley, Dairying Exemplified, or The Business of Cheesemaking (London, 1784) p. 18, courtesy of Google Books.
Note the assumption that daries were run by women. Historically, milking cows and the associated dairy production was considered “women’s work,” inappropriate for men. Thus well into the [...]
(Wal-Mart photo.)
Time Magazine reports that Wal-Mart has a plan: to put as many of its remaining competitors out of business as it can. And financial writer Jeff Hwang at Motley Fool notes that Wal-Mart already exerts an emormous amount of leverage over its suppliers:
“Wal-Mart accounts for 28% of Dial’s sales, 24% of Del Monte Foods’ sales, and [...]
Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, discusses the health dangers that industrial food has given us.
Are there health dangers with food from small farms? Certainly risks exist. But they’re not big news, because when they do occur, they are localized and not a national threat.
(Svadilfari photo.)
Who gets to decide what food you eat? In the case of potatoes, it’s McDonalds. Says AP:
Because McDonald’s buys more than 3.4 billion pounds of U.S. potatoes annually, it has the power to dictate whether a variety sprouts or winds up in the less-lucrative supermarket freezer’s crinklecut bin — or worse yet, banished to [...]
“Food, Inc. is an eye-opening expose of the modern food industry… where nearly all of the food provided to us in the US comes from five multinational corporations.” –Jane Cavalier, reviewing Food Inc. in The Cheese Enthusiast.
Check out the movie’s website here.
“In my mind, what a food system ought to do and what a strong one would accomplish is to really give us very healthy food that we know the source of. And it should help us build wealth in our communities. It should also help us connect with each other, as people who learn what [...]
(Euclid Van der Kroew photo: Farm equipment burried by the dust bowl, c. 1935.)
“Unless Americans radically rethink the way they grow and consume food, they face a future of eroded farmland, hollowed-out countryside, scarier germs, higher health costs — and bland taste. Sustainable food has an élitist reputation, but each of us depends on the [...]
What’s the big deal about eating locally-produced food? Why not run down to Wal-Mart and buy a necatrine from Chile or a bottle of water from France? The reasons are many– even when it seems to cost more to buy some locally-produced food than industrially-produced food, it’s still a good idea.
First and most important, local [...]